Onward Corporate Food Crusaders!

by Eric Holt Gimenez
Huffington Post

Excerpt from this article:

Seventeen agrifood monopolies (ADM, BASF, Bunge, Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro, Monsanto Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart Stores and Yara International) rolled out a new report financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation entitled “Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture.”

The monopolies propose “mobilizing the private sector through market-based solutions… to empower farmers and entrepreneurs to reach their full potential.” The report invites governments and civil society to join them in decreasing the portion of rural inhabitants living on less than $1.25 a day by 20% over each of the next two decades. (This admirable goal is considerably less ambitious than the Millennium Development goal of halving, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day by 2015).

A companion report (also financed by Bill Gates) announces the Business Alliance Against Chronic Hunger (BAACH), an offshoot of the Davos group called the Global Agenda Council on Food Security. BAACH calls for business-led solutions to global hunger by expanding markets in agricultural inputs, retail outlets, and sourcing and production of high-value crops.

The question is, why should the private sector invest in global hunger?
“The Next Billions: Business Strategies to Enhance Food Values Chains and Empower the Poor” financed by (you guessed it) Bill Gates comes right out and says it:

Globally, 3.7 billion people are largely excluded from formal markets. This group, earning US$8 a day or less, comprises the ‘base of the pyramid’ (BOP) in terms of economic levels. With an annual income of US$2.3 trillion a year that has grown at 8% in recent years, this market spends US$1.3 trillion a year on food. Around 70% of the BOP (2.5 billion people) depends on the food value chain for their incomes, either directly as small scale farmers and farm laborers, or indirectly as small scale entrepreneurs… The BOP represents a fast-growing consumer market.

The poor may not have much money, but since they are the fastest growing sector of the sagging global economy, they represent an important new market for the monopolies of the corporate food regime. Claims of “farmer and entrepreneur empowerment” need to be balanced with how well agribusiness and giant retail have “empowered” family farmers and local businesses in the US and around the world… Sooner or later, just about everyone ends up going out of business in the corporate race to the bottom line.

Read the entire article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/onward-corporate-food-cru_b_817058.html